Tiro is the novel’s narrator and lends the narrative its distinct viewpoint. He is an enslaved secretary inside an aristocratic system, taking shorthand notes on the most dangerous men in Rome. His opening sentence—“My name is Tiro. For thirty-six years I was the confidential secretary of the Roman statesman Cicero” (3)—sets the perspective: An old servant writing late in life about a world that has already collapsed. The implied impotence of this position echoes his status throughout the novel, where he is a constant witness to events but rarely has any opportunity to intervene in them. Indeed, his own life barely registers on the page at all, overshadowed by Cicero’s.

That said, his relationship to Cicero is more complicated than his status as an enslaved servant would imply. They study philosophy together in Athens, and Cicero relies on him for his transcriptions, his memory, his research abilities, and at the climax of Part 2, a feat of espionage that requires hiding behind a fabric in Crassus’s house and recording a coup in shorthand. When Cicero promises him freedom on the eve of that mission, he does so with genuine appreciation for Tiro’s efforts, explicitly stating, “[T]his offer of mine is not conditional in any way on your undertaking this mission […] [Y]ou have earned it many times over” (271). At the same time, his words are manipulative; his praise seeks to curry favor with Tiro, while his reference to “a day when [Cicero] shall ride over from [his] place to [Tiro’s] little farm” plays on Tiro’s long-established dream of a farm in Arpinum (171). The moment is generous and controlling at once, highlighting the power dynamics that underpin the men’s relationship.

One of the more consequential choices Tiro himself makes involves Caesar. He sees Caesar with Pompey’s pregnant wife Mucia but never tells Cicero. Years later, after Caesar’s death, he confesses, and Cicero says, “I wish you had informed me. Perhaps then things might have turned out differently” (177). The scene is the novel’s clearest indication that the small choices of subordinates shape history as much as the speeches of consuls. Tiro is loyal, observant, and complicit. He keeps Cicero’s secrets and his own.

Terentia is Cicero’s wife. Her dowry buys Cicero his Senate seat, and she never lets him forget it. She is plain, sharp, and aristocratic by blood, and Robert Harris often uses her to puncture Cicero’s self-regard. For example, when his nerve fails on the eve of his aedileship campaign, after Marcus Metellus draws the extortion court, it is Terentia who pulls him to his feet, takes command of the household, and tells him, “Make your speech shorter!” (122). The line becomes the foundation for the strategy that wins the Verres trial.

Terentia does this work without affection for Cicero’s politics. She loathes Pompey, the Piceneans, and the popular tribunes; she calls Pompey “the Prince of Picenum” and considers her husband’s alliance with him a disgrace to her class (215). When Cicero’s house is invaded by Verres’s freedman Timarchides, she “fell on that wretched freedman like a tigress out of a tree” (44). When Cicero hesitates to denounce Crassus and Caesar’s coup because the land bill is popular with his own voters, she replies: “Well, then, you have only yourself to blame for depending on such a rabble in the first place!” (278). Ultimately, her own self-interest supersedes her class identity; she may upbraid Cicero from time to time, but she is committed to advancing his career because her own fortunes are tied to it.

Their marriage is thus a working partnership held together by mutual usefulness and an undertow of real attachment. Terentia controls the money, monitors the household, and mistrusts every political ally her husband acquires. Cicero relies on her in large part because she will not flatter him, but on the morning of the consular election, when Cicero descends the stairs holding their infant son and says something to her on the staircase, Tiro realizes that they have also grown emotionally close in a way the circumstances of their marriage would not have predicted.

Quintus is Cicero’s brother and manages what Cicero does not manage himself: He runs the campaigns and marshals the supporters in the streets. However, Tiro argues that Cicero does not truly need Quintus in the way Quintus needs him: “Without Cicero, Quintus would have been a dull and competent officer in the army, and then a dull and competent farmer in Arpinum” (229). Quintus lacks Cicero’s outsized political talent: His instincts run toward force, where Cicero’s run toward speech. In the Subura tavern, when Cicero is interrogating the bribery agent Salinator, and the sequester tries to flee, Quintus throws him back into the room and kicks him in the stomach to keep him quiet. Later, he wants to march the agents straight to Crassus’s door and force a confrontation. Cicero refuses; the moment captures the brothers’ division of labor. Quintus is the muscle and the manager, while his brother is the strategist.

That said, Quintus is not merely a hanger-on. He proves willing to challenge Cicero after the latter accepts the aristocrats’ terms at Lucullus’s villa. Quintus sees the trap immediately: Opposing land reform will lose Cicero the people, and awarding triumphs to Lucullus and Metellus will lose him Pompey. When Quintus questions how Cicero will wield power with no base of support, the dinner falls silent before Cicero deflects with a joke. Quintus’s remark paves the way for the novel’s sequel by suggesting that the consulship is not the end of the story, only a more dangerous chapter.

Pompey, a Roman general and statesman, enters the novel at the height of his fame, but Robert Harris keeps showing the gap between the public image—broad face, scarlet cloak, the stride of “a full-grown bull” (189)—and the private man, who is bored, vain, and easily flattered into believing his speechwriters’ lines are his own. Cicero composes most of Pompey’s important utterances and notes the result with mingled admiration and contempt: “‘Did I like the line about hearths and temples?’ Well, naturally I did, you great booby—I wrote it!” (191).

The Pompey-Cicero relationship is an uneven alliance that reveals Cicero’s limited options as someone without inherited wealth and power. Pompey takes Cicero’s strategic advice on the lex Gabinia and lets Cicero engineer his return from feigned retirement, which ultimately secures him his command against the pirates. Years later, however, when Cicero is desperately campaigning for consul, Pompey is at Amisus receiving homage from 12 native kings and does not answer his letters. Cicero’s response is fatalistic: “If it is gratitude you want, get a dog” (261).

Pompey’s deeper significance lies in his relationship to The Republic’s Slow Surrender to Strongmen. The novel watches him accumulate unprecedented imperium—first against the pirates, then against Mithradates—and watches the Senate grant it under duress because the people demand it. Worse yet, he sets a precedent that later and more dangerous tyrants will exploit. The moment Pompey dons the paludamentum on the steps of the Capitol after the lex Gabinia passes, Caesar watches with an expression Tiro calls enraptured, “as if he were already glimpsing his own future” (209). Pompey is more flattered and self-important than ambitious, but others will be cleverer and bolder in their efforts to attain power.

Crassus, a general, politician, and Pompey’s major rival, is the richest man in Rome, and Harris uses him to demonstrate how money controls politics. He owns half the city’s tenements, runs enslaved laborers out as a private fire brigade who buy properties cheap from owners watching their houses burn, and crucifies 6,000 of the rebel Spartacus’s followers along the Appian Way. The crucifixions are the novel’s introduction to Crassus’s temperament: meticulous, patient, and entirely without remorse, as evidenced by his casual tone in explaining the logistics of the executions.

Crassus’s enmity with Cicero is the novel’s most sustained antagonism. Early on, he asks for Cicero’s support in his bid for consulship as well as a triumph; Cicero’s refusal obliges him to rely more heavily on Pompey’s patronage for protection. Later, Crassus offers Cicero a finer house and the consulship in exchange for backing a shared command with Pompey. Cicero again declines, and Crassus’s reply carries an unmistakable threat: He reminds Cicero of “the fate of Tiberius Gracchus” (198), a populist tribune beaten to death by aristocratic partisans.

The threat sends Tiro to the National Archive to research the precedent that ultimately defeats Crassus’s ally Trebellius, but in other instances, Cicero’s political instincts fail to overcome Crassus’s sheer wealth. Crassus does not personally appear at most of the meetings where his money buys outcomes; his presence is felt through bribery agents, tribunes whose vetoes he has purchased, and aristocrats whose loans he holds. When running for consul himself, Cicero estimates Crassus has invested 20 million sesterces to buy two consulships, three praetorships, and 10 tribunates. Where Pompey wants to be admired and Caesar wants to remake the world, Crassus wants returns on capital, and the consulships are an asset. Although his plans face a setback when Cicero is elected consul, the novel is clear that Crassus will remain a formidable adversary in the future.

Caesar, Rome’s future dictator, appears in the novel as a junior figure and steadily reveals himself as among the most dangerous minds in any room. He is in his early thirties for most of the book, broke, charming, and consistently positioned just behind a more powerful patron; he is Crassus’s debtor, Pompey’s strategist, and Mucia’s lover. Cicero senses but cannot prove that Caesar is in fact using his patrons to further his long-term designs on power. After the strategy conference at Pompey’s villa, Cicero suspects Caesar has planted the entire scheme for the lex Gabinia in Pompey’s mind: “Caesar is quite clever enough to have planted the seed and left it to flower on its own” (177).

Caesar’s patience distinguishes him from Pompey and other would-be demagogues. Rather than focusing his efforts on winning a particular election or command, he attends, listens, and influences, easily weathering momentary setbacks. For instance, when Cicero attacks Hybrida and Catilina in the In toga candida speech, Caesar tries to intervene to defend them and is brushed aside. However, the defeat is small, and Caesar absorbs it without visible cost.

Tiro’s secret about Mucia is the novel’s clearest glimpse of his character. Caesar sees Tiro see him, says nothing, and continues to have sex with another man’s wife. When he later jokes about buying Tiro from Cicero—“I would dearly love to get my hands on Tiro” (176)—the joke carries the menace of the witnessed scene, which only Tiro and Caesar understand. Years afterward, Cicero tells Tiro he wishes he had known: It would have shown him “the kind of breathtakingly reckless man we were dealing with” (177). In his total unscrupulousness, Caesar already embodies the Republic’s descent into autocracy.